Subscribe To

Monday, 10 July 2017

Going through the rituals - parallels between the Soviet Union and liberal America

Excellent
comments on the media response to the Trump-Putin meeting from America- based Russian, Vladimir Goldstein

Parallels
between the Soviet Union and comtemporary America

Vladimir
Goldstein, via Facebook

Back
in the Soviet Union, there was a well-scripted and well iron-out
routine of public dismissal and shaming. Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn,
Daniel and Sinyavsky -- whenever they did or publish something
"dangerous" -- there were a whole chain of meetings,
speeches, denunciations, articles and so on.

It
became such a routine, that it began to be applied from top to
bottom. When my family decided to emigrate in 1979, the place where I
just got a job as a computer programmer, also had to go through the
same motions.

There
was a special session of Komsomol organization of this research
institute where I got a a job, and there were speeches by the
Secretary of Party organization, and the secretary of Komsomol
organization, and the secretary of Trade-Union .... all denouncing my
treacherous decision to leave the great socialist paradise.

It
was a pure nothing burger. I drank with these guys, cracked up jokes;
Komsomol secretary telling how envious he is of me, going to the
west, while he still can't get his permission to visit the fricking
Poland), some wanted me to write how it was out there beyond the iron
curtain and so on, yet we all had to perform in the play written by
some mediocre writer for the show trials of 1930s.

This
public denunciations of Trump reminds me of the same old, cynical
script which people are forced to perform. With McCain playing the
role of Ideological enforcer, with Lindsey Graham as the Secretary
General of the Republican Party, with Adam Schiff, in the role of
young Komsomol, sorry, young Democrat Leader, Ash Carter as a
hard-nosed KGB security guy, who pretends to know more than he does,
along with the nincompoops of the press, cheerleading this idiotic
attack on Trump, who dares to deliver this great capitalist paradise
to the Russian Hackers.

All
this is both funny and pathetic. And if history is a guide, the US is
on the slippery slope toward Perestroika. Just do the invasion of
Afghanistan, or North Korea, or Syria, or something more serious,
where the country can get bogged down, and the rest is history, as
they say.